Cuba A Travel Mecca Awaiting Return Of American Tourists

November 16, 1986|By R.C. LONGWORTH, Chicago Tribune

HAVANA -- How`s this for a tourist paradise? A Caribbean island 25 minutes by air from the United States, with a sensational climate, glorious beaches, plenty of rum, friendly people and a treasure of Spanish colonial architecture.

There`s only one problem. You can`t go there. Or rather, you can go there if you`re a journalist or academic on a business trip, or a member of an official delegation. But if you`re just an American tourist looking for a lobster, a daiquiri and a suntan, forget it.

This is not Cuba`s doing. It would love to have American tourists spending American dollars again. But the Reagan administration has banned tourism and has made it stand up in court.

Someday Americans will be allowed to go to Cuba again. In the meantime, the Cuban government is polishing its rusty tourism skills on the 200,000-plus Canadians, Mexicans, West Europeans and other nationalities who come here each year.

``Actually, when the U.S. travel ban is lifted again, it`s going to take years for us to develop tourism from the United States,`` says Jesus Jimenez, director of Cubatur, the national tourist agency. ``Cuba as a tourist destination is crossed from everybody`s mind.``

It sure wasn`t always that way. Before Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, Cuba was an American playground. Fully 95 percent of Cuba`s tourists came from the States. Not only did hotels, restaurants, casinos and nightclubs cater to the Yankee tourist, most of them were owned by Americans -- not a few with Mafia links.

After the revolution, the Americans who ran most of the tourist facilities left Cuba. The hotels and restaurants went to seed. The government had to refurbish old hotels in Havana and at the splendid Varadero beach, reopen restaurants, even buy tourist buses.

By 1976, 40,000 tourists came. Last year this was up to 220,000 -- not bad but there`s room for improvement.

Of these 220,000, about 40,000 come from other communist countries on group tours and pay in rubles and other non-convertible currency. This figure is growing only slowly, and it is clear that Cuba is much more interested in expanding the 180,000 who came from Canada, Western Europe and Latin America and paid in hard convertible currency.

Technically, Americans aren`t forbidden to go to Cuba: Such a ban would violate constitutional rights. Instead, the government has imposed a currency restriction, forbidding Americans, other than academics, journalists and other special categories, from spending money in Cuba.

No Cuban believes that things are going to ease up while President Reagan is in office. But in the meantime, the government plans two new hotels in Havana, which has had no hotel construction since the revolution. It expects to triple the space available at Varadero Beach, which also will get a new airport. And it is pushing plans to turn Caya Largo, a 27-mile-long island off the south coast, into a strictly tourist island.

Tourists to Cuba get a lot for their money. Travel is cheap: It`s hard to pay more than $10 for a Havana meal, and a week-long stay at Varadero costs about $700, everything included, even the flight from Canada.

Hotels are clean and relatively modern. Food in most restaurants is decent but unexciting.